One morning this week, Will McPhail went out to buy a coffee. While fishing for his keys, he rested the takeaway cup on the roof of his car. A passerby spotted him.
“Oof,” the man said, with a convivial, wotcha-cobber gesture at the coffee. “Don’t drive off!”
“Nearly lost it there!” replied McPhail cheerily.
He hadn’t. “I knew exactly where it was, the whole time,” says McPhail now, from his Edinburgh flat. “I just wanted to join in. And then I said,” he winces: “‘That’d be 10 quid these days!’ These days! Like I know anything about coffee prices through the ages!”
McPhail has built a whole career on examining the minutiae of human interactions with fond exasperation and impish humour, the kinds of autopilot-patter we all deploy to smooth our passage through life. As a regular cartoonist for the New Yorker, McPhail pokes gentle fun at social conventions and the ludicrousness of following them when, in the end, we’re all going to die anyway. In one, Death himself stands on a doorstep, craning down to speak into an intercom: “It ruins the effect if I say who it is. Can you just come down?” A man dismisses a stork bringing a bundle of joy: “No, I ordered the lifetime of doing whatever I want.” A man and a woman on a date laugh, at ease and engaged – while, underneath the table, their duck legs are paddling furiously. Lady No-Kids is a fan favourite.
“All the time, I find myself in conversations where I am saying things that I don’t care about, or even mean, just to join in the performance,” says McPhail. “It’s when I can tell that the other person is doing it too, that makes you think: what are we doing? Who are we performing for?”
His debut graphic novel In explores what might happen if we were to stop. Nick is an aimless and unfulfilled young artist, fumbling for meaningful connections in the most superficial ways. He cherishes small talk with bartenders, recommends craft beers he doesn’t like and tries to engineer a “usual” at the pretentious cafes where he works so as to be seen working. (“A lot of dudes who look like you come through here, man,” shrugs the barista.)
But midway through a banal exchange with a plumber fixing his leaky toilet, “just making the noises that will navigate us both out of the conversation unscathed”, Nick stumbles upon a superpower: saying what he really feels.
“Sonder” is a neologism popular on social media, originating from the online Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is defined as “the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as yours”. Nick’s epiphany unlocks not just the complex and peculiar worlds of other people – presented as surreal, sweeping colour sequences in an otherwise black-and-white book – but also his own.
In is most autobiographical in its humour, says McPhail, teasing his own “woke boy” tendencies and patronage of trendy cafes across Edinburgh. (His custom rivals JK Rowling’s, he claims: “If my book is anywhere near not a flop, I better get some plaques around this place.”) But In did spring from his own experience of breakthroughs in connection, the “conversations that feel kind of transcendent in their intimacy”, he says.
“I’ve always been fascinated by how combinations of letters and words can change the mechanics of a conversation, and turn it from one completely different thing into another. When that’s happened to me, on the rare occasions, and I’ve been transported into this other person’s world … the book was an attempt to describe that feeling.”
This is a daunting bar for an interviewer, so I am quietly relieved when McPhail is not only so approachable as to be wearing pyjamas at 3.30pm, but seems to respond to my sweeping questions – about relationships under capitalism, the dehumanising effect of tech; the impediments to intimacy in (as In’s blurb puts it) “our isolated times” – with good-natured alarm.
The message of In might be to strive for genuine connection, but that doesn’t mean having to choose big talk over small. “Like Nick says in the book: it doesn’t have to be abortions, or aliens. It’s just about being open, and stopping performing.” And, sometimes – “shutting up and listening”.
He doesn’t want people to feel they have to connect with him, McPhail hastens to explain. “I know I’ve written a book about deep connections, but I’m still the guy from a little town in the north of England where no one discusses their feelings.” So how much is he prepared to tell me about those transformative conversations that made such an impact on him? “Um ...” he pretends to consider answering this. “Nothing at all!”
McPhail relates to Nick’s “tendency to observe, rather than participate … to be sort of floating above yourself”. He does single out times with his family (he grew up in Lancashire) where he has been pushed beyond his role as son or brother, “where it really felt like it was something different happening”.
In explores this in Nick’s relationships with Hannah, his mum, and his love interest Wren, an oncologist – both of who are frustrated by the constraints of their social roles on their ability to connect, as much as they sometimes hide behind them. Many of McPhail’s relatives work for the NHS, and he drew inspiration from their personal flexibility: “They can be incredibly compassionate and serious when they’re in a professional capacity, then you flick a switch and they can be their joyful selves again.”
McPhail studied zoology at Glasgow University – “I wanted to spend 30 grand on something when I was 17 years old” – before his path became clear when he couldn’t stop drawing. Animals make regular appearances in his New Yorker cartoons, “because I love animals, or because I’m trying to retroactively justify doing this degree”, McPhail says. (“Very characterful” pigeons are a particular favourite.)
After a string of wildly unsuccessful supermarket jobs, McPhail broke into the New Yorker through a combination of persistence and “unbelievable” luck when one of his many submissions, posted from Edinburgh, was plucked from the famously sizeable slush pile. “In terms of giving advice, it honestly does feel like telling somebody to buy a lottery ticket,” he says. His sense of debt to his editors at the magazine, “in a career without recognisable structure or direction”, is evident in the book’s heartfelt acknowledgments.
He submits 10 finished single-panel cartoons each Tuesday; one, sometimes two are picked, and the best of the rest he posts on his Instagram, where he has a lively following. He insists that he has no themes, formulas or rich seams of inspiration he returns to: “The best I can do is just kind of sitting there, and hoping my sense of humour shows up.”
But, he adds, “generally speaking: pigeons and sex.”
In by Will McPhail is published by Sceptre. To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.
